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Topic: Education and Child Policy

I like a clever two-stage least squares instrumental variable regression as much as the next wonk, and the very clever Martin West and Ludger Woessman have just given us one. In “School Choice International” (an econometric study and not a motivational tune) they show that increased competition from private schools improves overall student achievement – including public school achievement – in 29 OECD countries, while lowering overall per pupil spending.

The design of this study seems intended to address the concern that however wonderful private sector education might be, children remaining in public schools might suffer if the private sector were allowed to expand. Those ideologically or financially attached to the existing public school monopoly often like to raise this concern in arguing against greater parental choice and competition in education. The West & Woessman result suggests that the monopolists need not be concerned, because even students remaining in the monopoly schools benefit from an expansion of the private education sector.

This is all well and good. It is also somewhat beside the point, because the concern itself presupposes behavior on the part of parents that is largely fictional. The monopolists’ presupposition is that, no matter how much worse the public sector is, no matter how easily accessible the private sector becomes, some large number of families will decide to languish in atrocious state schools. This is nonsense.

In what field do significant numbers of people cling to earlier services or technologies that are universally recognized as inferior, when those services or technologies compete on a level playing field (i.e., when neither receives preferential treatment from the state)? Do vast throngs of people still cling to vinyl LPs? Do you often see kids today trucking around portable CD players, now that .mp3 players can hold hundreds or thousands of times more music at a similar cost? Do you see a lot of horse-drawn vehicles in your neighborhood?

The only thing that keeps large numbers of families in bad government schools is the positively fantastic level of government funding discrimination that exists in virtually all nations. Most governments fund their own schools but not private schools. Or, if they fund private schools, they do so at noticeably lower levels than they do government schools. In the rare cases where that funding discrimination is eliminated or even substantially reduced, the government sector shrinks dramatically. And, not surprisingly, the public schools that do survive after many years of such shrinkage tend to be the better performers within that sector.

The Netherlands, which funds public and private schools more or less equally, is a case in point. Today, three quarters of Dutch high school students are enrolled in private schools. And while research does show that private Catholic schools in the Netherlands continue to outperform the public schools in that country, even though the Catholic school students have a weaker average socio-economic background, the remaining public schools really aren’t doing that much worse. If they were greatly inferior to the private schools, they would have already lost their students to the private sector.

My point is that the effect on public schools of easing access to the private sector in education is virtually irrelevant. If the public schools improve, great, they’ll survive. If they don’t, it’ll be because families have left them for private schools that do a better job of serving them. In either case, the public is benefiting. The idea that great masses of humanity will choose to linger in low quality government schools when higher quality schools become available at a comparable or lower cost shows a bizarre lack of understanding of human nature, and a gross detachment from reality.

So last night, after hearing almost nothing about it in the three previous debates, education got the last question. In a way it’s a good sign that education has been largely frozen out — Washington shouldn’t be involved in the first place, as the Constitution makes clear and I’ll soon explain further — but since Washington is involved, we need to hear what the candidates have to say.

Because education has been such a marginal issue I haven’t had much reason to weigh in on it. Now that I’ve got the chance, I’m going whole-hog by reproducing most of the exchange from last night and commenting in italics beneath all the parts that demand it. This is, as a result, going to be a long entry, but it will address just about every issue the candidates touched. So grab a tasty beverage, pick up a snack, and take heart that while this could be long and tedious, it couldn’t possibly be as boring as the actual debate!

And now we join the debate already in progress…

SCHIEFFER: The question is this: the U.S. spends more per capita than any other country on education. Yet, by every international measurement, in math and science competence, from kindergarten through the 12th grade, we trail most of the countries of the world.

The implications of this are clearly obvious. Some even say it poses a threat to our national security.

Do you feel that way and what do you intend to do about it…

Great question, Mr. Schieffer! You are absolutely right on spending: According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), we spend more per-capita on education than any other industrialized nation. It should be noted, though, that in primary education we are outspent by Iceland and Luxembourg, and in secondary education by Luxembourg, Switzerland and Norway. But that still leaves almost everyone, including such high-flyers as Japan, Finland, and South Korea, well behind us. Oh, and it isn’t accurate to say that we trail “most of the countries of the world” in math and science competence. How we do depends on grade level and test, not to mention that most countries in the world don’t participate in international comparisons. Nonetheless, we regularly trail lots of industrialized nations that spend far less on education than we do, and that’s pretty bad.

OBAMA: This probably has more to do with our economic future than anything and that means it also has a national security implication, because there’s never been a nation on earth that saw its economy decline and continued to maintain its primacy as a military power. So we’ve got to get our education system right. Now, typically, what’s happened is that there’s been a debate between more money or reform, and I think we need both.

It’s nice to see Sen. Obama try to make the national security connection. This used to be the only way to sell federal involvement in education because the Constitution actually gives the feds authority over national defense, but I thought politicians had stopped bothering with it long ago. Of course, the link is far too tenuous for most federal education policy to actually be legitimate — a happy population is needed for national security, so why not have the feds give out cotton candy and rainbows to take on bin Laden? — but at least trying to make it still seems somewhat necessary.

In some cases, we are going to have to invest. Early childhood education, which closes the achievement gap, so that every child is prepared for school, every dollar we invest in that, we end up getting huge benefits with improved reading scores, reduced dropout rates, reduced delinquency rates.

Uggh! This is just pie in the sky. As Adam Schaeffer has made abundantly clear, the promises of untold riches accruing from “investment” in early-childhood education are based mainly on extrapolations of a handful of often-questionable studies of tiny, hyper-targeted programs. And as California learned with class-size reduction, small programs can’t explode into big ones without inflicting terrible damage.

I think it’s going to be critically important for us to recruit a generation of new teachers, an army of new teachers, especially in math and science, give them higher pay, give them more professional development and support in exchange for higher standards and accountability.

We do need math and science teachers, and the answer to that problem is to let schools pay them more (or give them more freedom, or some kind of inducement that would vary by teacher). Of course, schools should also be able to better reward high-performing English, math, PE, or any other subject teachers as well, but as long as we have government schooling the unions will have control, and that means no one will get compensated better than anyone else.

We don’t need an army of new teachers. Heck, we probably don’t even need a platoon.

And I think it’s important for us to make college affordable. Right now, I meet young people all across the country who either have decided not to go to college or if they’re going to college, they are taking on $20,000, $30,000, $50,000, $60,000 worth of debt, and it’s very difficult for them to go into some fields, like basic research in science, for example, thinking to themselves that they’re going to have a mortgage before they even buy a house.

And that’s why I’ve proposed a $4,000 tuition credit, every student, every year, in exchange for some form of community service, whether it’s military service, whether it’s Peace Corps, whether it’s working in a community…

Boy, do I get tired of this one! Maybe the Senator knows someone who has taken on $60,000 in debt just to go to college, but the average undergraduate debt level for students who take on debt — which is far from every student — is only about $20,000. Maybe the $60,000 student should have economized a bit. And there’s the little matter of the average $1 million college wage premium that would make even a $60,000 investment a pretty good one. Oh, and why should the now-famous Joe the Plumber have to pay someone else’s way to Harvard?

That said, college costs have been rising really fast, but guess what? Student aid, especially provided by Washington, has helped to fuel the rocket! Quite simply, when you give a kid another hundred bucks, it’s a hundred bucks more that a school can charge. And have we been giving kids the bucks! According to the College Board (table 7), total, inflation-adjusted, aid per full-time-equivalent student, most of which came through Washington, rose almost 140 percent over the last twenty years, from $3,967 to $9,499. And yet, we still have massive affordability problems. Hmm..

If we do those things, then I believe that we can create a better school system.

But there’s one last ingredient that I just want to mention, and that’s parents. We can’t do it just in the schools. Parents are going to have to show more responsibility. They’ve got to turn off the TV set, put away the video games, and, finally, start instilling that thirst for knowledge that our students need.

Yes, parents have a role in our academic problems, and there is almost certainly a cultural component to why we don’t do as well on international exams as other nations. But isn’t one of the strongest messages of government schooling that parents can’t and shouldn’t be responsible for their children’s education, that that is the role of government? And, frankly, blaming parents for bad outcomes when we give them no real control over their children’s education — the power to pull their kids out of bad schools and put them into good ones — is pretty rich.

SCHIEFFER: Senator McCain?

MCCAIN: Well, it’s the civil rights issue of the 21st century. There’s no doubt that we have achieved equal access to schools in America after a long and difficult and terrible struggle.

But what is the advantage in a low income area of sending a child to a failed school and that being your only choice?

Good question!

So choice and competition amongst schools is one of the key elements that’s already been proven in places in like New Orleans and New York City and other places, where we have charter schools, where we take good teachers and we reward them and promote them.

And we find bad teachers another line of work. And we have to be able to give parents the same choice, frankly, that Senator Obama and Mrs. Obama had and Cindy and I had to send our kids to the school – their kids to the school of their choice. Charter schools aren’t the only answer, but they’re providing competition. They are providing the kind of competitions that have upgraded both schools – types of schools.

While Sen. McCain only mentions charter schools specifically, I read this as ultimately endorsing full school choice for all kids, giving all parents “the same choice, frankly, that Senator Obama and Mrs. Obama had and Cindy and I had to send our kids to the school – their kids to the school of their choice.” We know choice works in large part just by looking at all the wonderful things free markets have brought us, ranging from smaller and smaller iPods to faster and faster computers. We also, though, know that choice works in education when it is allowed to operate, as the huge literature review of market education just completed by Andrew Coulson powerfully shows.

Now, throwing money at the problem is not the answer. You will find that some of the worst school systems in America get the most money per student.

So I believe that we need to reward these good teachers.

By all means reward good teachers, but the only efficient and effective way to do that is to reward the best schools, and the only effective way to do that is universal school choice.

MCCAIN: We need to encourage programs such as Teach for America and Troops to Teachers where people, after having served in the military, can go right to teaching and not have to take these examinations which – or have the certification that some are required in some states.

Look, we must improve education in this country. As far as college education is concerned, we need to make those student loans available. We need to give them a repayment schedule that they can meet. We need to have full student loan program for in-state tuition. And we certainly need to adjust the certain loan eligibility to inflation.

SCHIEFFER: Do you think the federal government should play a larger role in the schools? And I mean, more federal money?

OBAMA: Well, we have a tradition of local control of the schools and that’s a tradition that has served us well. But I do think that it is important for the federal government to step up and help local school districts do some of the things they need to do.

Now we tried to do this under President Bush. He put forward No Child Left Behind. Unfortunately, they left the money behind for No Child Left Behind. And local school districts end up having more of a burden, a bunch of unfunded mandates, the same kind of thing that happened with special education where we did the right thing by saying every school should provide education to kids with special needs, but we never followed through on the promise of funding, and that left local school districts very cash-strapped.

Cash-strapped schools my…! Let’s start with No Child Left Behind. Its problem is not that “they left the money behind.” Under President Bush, NCLB spending rose from $17.4 billion in 2001 to $24.4 billion in 2008, a 40 percent increase. That pretty big, and let’s not forget the part about our spending more per pupil than almost any other industrialized nation. Funding is simply not the problem! Bob Schieffer seems to understand that. Why doesn’t Sen. Obama?

So what I want to do is focus on early childhood education, providing teachers higher salaries in exchange for more support. Senator McCain and I actually agree on two things that he just mentioned.

Charter schools, I doubled the number of charter schools in Illinois despite some reservations from teachers unions. I think it’s important to foster competition inside the public schools.

Competition within public schools is pretty much no competition at all. Gray or off-white Trabant? There’s competition for you!

That said, charter schools are different from straight public-school choice because the schools can be fairly independent. The degree of independence, however, depends on how state laws are written — many permit almost no independence at all — and because charters are public schools, government can crush them whenever they want.

And we also agree on the need for making sure that if we have bad teachers that they are swiftly – after given an opportunity to prove themselves, if they can’t hack it, then we need to move on because our kids have to have their best future.

Where we disagree is on the idea that we can somehow give out vouchers – give vouchers as a way of securing the problems in our education system. And I also have to disagree on Senator McCain’s record when it comes to college accessibility and affordability.

Recently his key economic adviser was asked about why he didn’t seem to have some specific programs to help young people go to college and the response was, well, you know, we can’t give money to every interest group that comes along.

Nothing makes me sadder than the assumption that “specific programs” is synonymous with “solutions.” The federal government is teeming with “specific programs” in education, yet college costs keep right on ballooning and K-12 schools keep right on stagnating. It’s time for some real change, and that means acknowledging that doing more doesn’t necessarily mean doing better.

I don’t think America’s youth are interest groups, I think they’re our future. And this is an example of where we are going to have to prioritize. We can’t say we’re going to do things and then not explain in concrete terms how we’re going to pay for it.

And if we’re going to do some of the things you mentioned, like lowering loan rates or what have you, somebody has got to pay for it. It’s not going to happen on its own.

SCHIEFFER: What about that, Senator?

MCCAIN: Well, sure. I’m sure you’re aware, Senator Obama, of the program in the Washington, D.C., school system where vouchers are provided and there’s a certain number, I think it’s a thousand and some and some 9,000 parents asked to be eligible for that.

Because they wanted to have the same choice that you and I and Cindy and your wife have had. And that is because they wanted to choose the school that they thought was best for their children.

And we all know the state of the Washington, D.C., school system. That was vouchers. That was voucher, Senator Obama. And I’m frankly surprised you didn’t pay more attention to that example.

Now as far as the No Child Left Behind is concerned, it was a great first beginning in my view. It had its flaws, it had its problems, the first time we had looked at the issue of education in America from a nationwide perspective. And we need to fix a lot of the problems. We need to sit down and reauthorize it.

It has flaws alright, most of all that it gives yet more power to politicians and bureaucrats and practically begs them to lie to parents about how the schools are really doing. The law doesn’t need to be reauthorized, it needs to be destroyed, because it, like all top-down education policies, invariably ends up working for the people employed by the system, not the parents and children it’s supposed to serve. Stick with school choice, Sen. McCain. It’s the only way to make schools truly accountable.

But, again, spending more money isn’t always the answer. I think the Head Start program is a great program. A lot of people, including me, said, look, it’s not doing what it should do. By the third grade many times children who were in the Head Start program aren’t any better off than the others.

Classic political confusion. I mean, what could be a greater program than one that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to? All I can think of is one that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do but lavishes even more money on worthless stuff for cute kids so that politicians can show how much they “care.”

Let’s reform it. Let’s reform it and fund it. That was, of course, out-of-bounds by the Democrats. We need to reform these programs. We need to have transparency. We need to have rewards. It’s a system that cries out for accountability and transparency and the adequate funding.

And I just said to you earlier, town hall meeting after town hall meeting, parents come with kids, children – precious children who have autism. Sarah Palin knows about that better than most. And we’ll find and we’ll spend the money, research, to find the cause of autism. And we’ll care for these young children. And all Americans will open their wallets and their hearts to do so.

Remember school choice? The McKay scholarship program does a fantastic job helping disabled kids because it gives parents the power to demand the help their children need. In contrast, forcing parents to just “open their wallets” and “find” money gives us this.

MCCAIN: But to have a situation, as you mentioned in our earlier comments, that the most expensive education in the world is in the United States of America also means that it cries out for reform, as well.

And I will support those reforms, and I will fund the ones that are reformed. But I’m not going to continue to throw money at a problem. And I’ve got to tell you that vouchers, where they are requested and where they are agreed to, are a good and workable system. And it’s been proven.

“I’m not going to continue to throw money at a problem”? What happened to “and we’ll find and we’ll spend the money, research, to find the cause of autism. And we’ll care for these young children. And all Americans will open their wallets and their hearts to do so.” Again, classic political confusion.

OBAMA: I’ll just make a quick comment about vouchers in D.C. Senator McCain’s absolutely right: The D.C. school system is in terrible shape, and it has been for a very long time. And we’ve got a wonderful new superintendent there who’s working very hard with the young mayor there to try…

MCCAIN: Who supports vouchers.

OBAMA: … who initiated – actually, supports charters.

MCCAIN: She supports vouchers, also.

OBAMA: But the – but here’s the thing, is that, even if Senator McCain were to say that vouchers were the way to go – I disagree with him on this, because the data doesn’t show that it actually solves the problem – the centerpiece of Senator McCain’s education policy is to increase the voucher program in D.C. by 2,000 slots.

The data DOES show that choice works, though vouchers are not necessarily the best way to deliver it. Again, though, see Coulson…please!

That leaves all of you who live in the other 50 states without an education reform policy from Senator McCain.

So if we are going to be serious about this issue, we’ve got to have a president who is going to tackle it head-on. And that’s what I intend to do as president.

We’ve had a president “tackle it head-on,” and what we got was NCLB. The fact of the matter is that the president can’t possibly be Principal-in-Chief — no two communities in America are exactly alike, much less any two students, so no one man or system can educate them equally well — and to pronounce otherwise exemplifies the pervasive, ludicrous assumption of presidential omnipotence. School choice, not more government promises or plans, is the only way to ultimately fix American education, and by focusing his rhetoric on that, McCain at least seems close to actually understanding reality.

It’s unclear whether the four-year-old Washington [DC voucher] program is actually working. So far, the Education Department has found little if any difference in the test scores of kids who got vouchers to attend private school.

The implication here is that test scores are the only thing that matter in evaluating whether or not an education system is “working.” In reality, most people not only care how good something is, but also how much it costs. If we take cost into account, does the picture change?

According to the most recent report on the DC voucher program, to which the AP is alluding, the average tuition charged by voucher-accepting private schools is $5,928. As I reported in the Washington Postand fully documented on this blog, total per-pupil spending in DC public schools was $24,600 in the 2007-08 school year. Even if we allow for the fact that the typical private school receives something like 20 percent of its revenue from sources other than tuition, this is still rather a big difference. Public schools are spending more than three times as much to get about the same academic result. Meanwhile, as the DC voucher study notes, parents are a lot happier with their chosen voucher schools than the city’s public school parents are with their schools.

Parents are happier, and the program produces academic achievement at least as good as the district schools at less than one third their cost. For a nation in a bit of a financial bind, this seems to me like a program that’s working, even though it does have its faults and there are even better options.

Even if some people won’t admit it, by now everyone understands that the No Child Left Behind Act is just one, big, perverse incentive, an obnoxious federal law that practically screams at states, “lie about ‘proficiency’ and ‘accountability.’ As long as I can prattle on about caring for all children, I don’t care what you do!”

Despite this widespread understanding, it’s rare to catch a public official actually admitting to gaming the law, which is what makes this bit from Monday’s New York Times ickily refreshing:

Why did California decide on six years of relatively slow achievement growth, followed by six years of extraordinary gains? Officials from many states told the Bush administration in 2002 that they needed time to write new tests and accustom teachers to them.

But the California state school superintendent, Jack O’Connell, said he also bet that Congress might change the law in 2007, perhaps by removing its 100 percent proficiency goal. “It’s true that was in the back of my mind when we negotiated our plan with the feds,” Mr. O’Connell said. “And I’d do the same thing again. I’m still hoping a new administration will change the law.”

Thanks for the candor, Mr. O’Connell. It concisely illustrates why NCLB and its predecessors have been failures, and why the only way to improve education is to give parents, not politicians, power over the schools.

I should have posted this yesterday, but was busy with other things, including a terrific discussion about higher education featuring Charles Murray, author of the new book Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality, and St. John’s College, Annapolis, President Christopher Nelson. (The video should be up shortly if you’re looking for a little enlightenment.)

Anyway, there was, as many in the edublogosphere have been lamenting, almost no mention of education in Tuesday night’s debate. There were, however, quick, periodic mentions from Senator Obama of the need to make college affordable, something he plans to do by throwing yet more cash into already overflowing federal student aid streams. Unfortunately, no education commentators looking to latch onto our current economic woes and be heard have made this clear connection (probably because they don’t want to): Federal student aid is our current, government-driven, economic disaster in microcosm. Washington has been buying middle-class votes with ever-greater loads of student aid for decades, but rather than making college more affordable it has wasted hundreds-of-billions of taxpayer dollars, driven tuition higher and higher into the stratosphere, and made colleges richer and fatter. It’s a perfect example of how government “help”–such as Fannie and Freddie buying sub-prime loans like they were plastics–only truly helps politicians get re-elected, special interests wealthier, and everyone else stuck with huge bills.

That could be the rallying cry of Charles Murray in this month’s Cato Unbound. Suppose, he argues, we were to give the job of designing our higher education system to an expert, and that expert gives us the following proposal:

First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that often has nothing to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn’t meet the goal. We will call the goal a “BA.”

Mad, says Murray. A terrible system.

Education should not be made to suffer under a system like this, and neither should those who want to achieve something with their lives. You can read his proposals for education reform in this month’s Cato Unbound. Education economist Pedro Carneiro will have a reply tomorrow, economist Bryan Caplan of George Mason University will reply on Friday, and education policy expert Kevin Carey will have a follow-up on Monday.

Colleges and politicians love the Big Dance, but not the one you’re thinking of. No, I’m talking about the constant, nationwide tap dance around the mere possibility that super-abundant student aid might fuel rampant tuition inflation. Case in point, a lengthy article in the Boston Globe this weekend that flitted and twirled around higher-education costs but completely ignored the possibility that ballooning aid might abet mega-inflation. The closest the Globe came to tackling that very real possibility was this bit buried deep in the article:

It must be said that parents are not entirely blameless. For their money, they demand amenities like state-of-the-art gyms and dormitories in a dog-chasing-its-tail spiral.

The real problem, of course, is that much of the money parents are waving around to demand the best isn’t theirs at all: it belongs to taxpayers, a little tidbit that got nary a nod in the Globe. In the 2003-04 school year (the latest with available data), 48 percent of undergraduates received some sort of federal aid, including grants, loans, work study, or some combination thereof. Overall, inflation-adjusted aid coming through Washington rose 77 percent over just the last ten years, from $48.7 billion to $86.3 billion. Add to that $7.8 billion in state grants in the 2006-07 school year, $26.3 billion in grants from institutions, and $10.2 billion in private/employer grants, and two things are abundantly clear: there are tankers full of aid dollars out there, and they have to be playing at least some role—and probably a huge one—in driving up college costs.

So when will the media stop taking the higher education/politician party line that aid is the key to college access and has no impact on prices? I’m not sure, but I have a bad feeling that lots of the enjoyablebig dances will have passed before it starts to happen.